Name that Theorist
This anthropologist drew on structuralist theory, particularly the "nature"/"culture" divide, to explain the seemingly universal subordination of women across human societies.
Sherry Ortner
This theory examines how universal patterns of human thought organize culture through systems of signs, symbols, and binary oppositions.
Structuralism
This ceremonial exchange system, studied by Bronisław Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands, involves the circulation of red shell necklaces (soulava) and white shell armbands (mwali) between island communities to establish social relationships and prestige.
Kula
Anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod argues that anthropologists need to critically reconsider this concept, which is often treated as ahistorical, bounded, and internally homogeneous.
Culture
These anthropological theories examine cultural phenomena and social systems over time, focusing on historical development, change, and transformation.
Diachronic theories
This sociologist/anthropologist wrote The Gift (1925), in which he argued that gift exchange is a “total social phenomenon” that creates and maintains social relationships through reciprocal obligations to give, receive, and reciprocate.
Marcel Mauss
Anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan's belief that cultures develop through stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization is a good example of this theory.
Unilineal cultural evolutionism
This branch of anthropology involves the comparative study of cultures and societies, often using ethnographic information to identify similarities, differences, and broader patterns across human groups.
Ethnology
This assumption of structuralism suggests that the same underlying structures of human thought operate across all cultures, leading critics to argue that it overlooks historical and cultural difference
Universalism
These pairs of opposing concepts (like nature/culture, hot/cold, life/death, raw/cooked, etc.) are fundamental to structuralist analysis, particularly in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s work on how the human mind organizes cultural meaning.
Binary Oppositions
This anthropologist was a student of Franz Boas and suggested that human behaviour, perception, and thought, are fundamentally shaped by learned social customs rather than bioloigcal instinct, race, of a universal human nature.
Ruth Benedict
This theory emphasizes the unique historical development of each culture and rejects cultural evolutionary frameworks.
Edward Burnett Tylor used this term to describe cultural practices, customs, or beliefs that persist into later stages of cultural development, even after the original conditions that produced them have disappeared.
Survivals
Franz Boas’s research on these groups challenged the assumption that racial differences were biologically fixed, demonstrating that bodily characteristics could change in response to environmental and social conditions.
Immigrants
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s theory that all human beings share underlying structures of thought was heavily influenced by this approach to language, particularly the work of Ferdinand de Saussure.
Structural linguistics
This anthropologist is famous for defining "culture" as "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.
Edward B. Tylor
This theory suggests that social institutions exist in order to maintain social order, equilibrium, and structural continuity.
Structural Functionalism
This concept, developed by Émile Durkheim, describes the social cohesion found in complex, industrialized societies, where individuals depend on one another because of an increasingly specialized division of labour.
Organic solidarity
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown criticized this theory of Bronisław Malinowski's for being too focused on individual biological needs as opposed to how social institutions maintain the continuity and organization of society.
Psychological Functionalism
Anthropologist Julian Steward developed this theory of cultural change, arguing that societies do not all progress through the same universal stages but instead follow different evolutionary pathways shaped by their particular environmental and historical conditions.
Multilinear Evolutionism (the approach is also called "cultural ecology").
This anthropologist argued that joking relationships help maintain social solidarity by regulating tensions within social relationships.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
Franz Boas criticized both cultural evolutionism, which proposed that all societies progress through universal stages of development, and this approach, which explains cultural similarities through the spread of traits, ideas, and practices between societies.
Diffusionism
Claude Lévi-Strauss used this term to describe the process of creating new meanings or ideas by creatively combining existing cultural materials, symbols, and concepts.
Bricolage (a bricoleur)
Herbert Spencer, whose ideas influenced the development of British functionalism, popularized the phrase “survival of the fittest” to apply evolutionary principles to human societies, helping establish this ideology.
Social Darwinism / Eugenics
Marcel Mauss’s concept of prestations as “total social phenomena” was influenced by his uncle Émile Durkheim’s concept of these external, socially established ways of acting, thinking, and feeling that exert coercive power over individuals.
Social Facts